The Brain is Wider than the Sky
Why Simple Solutions Don’t Work in a Complex World
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
In The Brain is Wider than the Sky Bryan Appleyard uses a combination of memoir, reportage and cultural analysis to examine a critical moment in our history.
Drawing on his experience as an acclaimed writer on science, new technology and the arts, he charts the tantalising choices we now face and the questions we should be asking ourselves. The book is a widely informed meditation on the fast-moving technological forces of the present and how they will shape our future and define the priorities of the new machine age. Read an extract
“Bryan Appleyard’s The Brain is Wider than the Sky is a beautifully written defence of human complexity in the face of the corporate mechanisation of our lives. If you are frustrated by automated queuing, this is one for you.” Michael Burleigh
“Bryan Appleyard is that rarest of rare birds, a literary journalist of general interests who can mine factual subjects for their poetic resonance right across the spectrum. He is our main man for this kind of writing: no cheap tricks, only expensive ones, and the whole thing beginning from a deep interest in what is going on. All that and Monica Bellucci: because he has the gift of stillness that makes even a screen goddess feel obliged to say something that matters.” Clive James
“Bryan Appleyard is our foremost guide to understanding contemporary culture. In previous books he has illuminated the role of science in the way we think, the strange cult of alien abduction and our increasing obsession with death. Now he explores a development that is transforming the whole of human experience—the arrival of a second machine age, in which new technologies are changing our sense of self. The emerging science of complexity shows how changes in different areas can produce something irreducibly new. In much the same way, Appleyard suggests, the Internet and artificial intelligence are radically altering the way we live— creating new types of complexity at the risk of simplifying the human mind. Ranging from computer labs to the poetry of Emily Dickinson through ” quants” in search of formulae that capture the chaos of financial markets to believers in a coming “Singularity” that will allow our minds to be uploaded into cyberspace and much, much more, Appleyard’s exploration of what it means to be human today grips the reader from the first page.” John Gray
“There are great science writers and there are great arts writers – and then there’s Bryan Appleyard. He’s both.” John Humphrys
“Bryan Appleyard is one of the most interesting, curious, cultured, and trenchant persons on this planet.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“As readers have come to expect from Bryan Appleyard, his new book is another literate and sensitive reflection on how science is changing our self-understanding.” Steve Fuller
“Bryan Appleyard, you’re a clever guy…” Jeremy Paxman
“Appleyard’s meditation is essential reading.” Simon Ings
“His thoughtful message is this: human beings are immensely complex, capable of great artistic and intellectual feats, and we must celebrate this quality and challenge the dumbing down inflicted by machines.” Hamish McRae
“Appleyard is a gifted writer, able to explain both the beauty of a Hockney drawing and the mathematical unit used to measure how many computations processors like our brains are capable of performing (the charmingly named petaflop). His book takes in a sojourn in an fMRI machine to see whether creativity can be mapped, a visit to Microsoft in the 1990s to meet its techno-evangelists and a disquisition on why interviews with actors are so boring and Cheryl Cole finds it hard to eat in public.” Helen Lewis-Hasteley
About the cover
I interviewed David Hockney for The Sunday Times in January. Soon afterwardsI began receiving emailed drawings he had done on his iPad; pretty soon I had a large gallery of original Hockneys. They were beautiful, infinitely varied and very personal – Hockney would frequently draw the view from his bed at dawn or a road seen from the seat of his car. At some point I realised that the theme of great artist using high technology to produce such works lay close to the heart of this book. I asked Hockney if he would agree to do my cover. Some months later a cactus arrived in my email. The subject line read: “I drew this flowering cactus and thought of your book cover. What do you think?” I thought it was astonishing. He said the cactus looked like a brain, but I prefer to think that sometimes a cactus is just a cactus.
A video of Hockney talking to me about his iPad art is below.